Made in Ireland

Studies in Popular Music

Áine Mangaoang, John O'Flynn, Lonán Ó Briain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429811852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. The volume also includes a coda by Gerry Smyth, one of the most published authors on Irish popular music.

PART 1
Music Industries and Historiographies

Lonán Ó Briain

Industries and historiographies of Irish popular music are closely entwined with the economic, political and social contexts of life on this island. Part One comprises six chapters that cover a representative sample of case studies illustrating the multiplicity of these infrastructures for and stories about music.

Following Williamson and Cloonan (2007), we use the term “music industries” in plural form here to draw attention to the dense layers of activity within Irish musical life. Recording industries, as Michael Mary Murphy shows us in Chapter One, are not immune from this pluralization. Ireland’s relatively weak economy and near-constant flow of outward migration prior to the 1990s made the island an unattractive market. The first successful labels released Irish popular music to produce recordings in the diaspora for a wealthier and more populous transatlantic market from the 1920s. Domestic labels began recording regularly after World War Two. Although domestic labels remain overshadowed by the majors in the latest Irish charts, Murphy demonstrates how small-scale Irish labels provide vital opportunities for young musicians and under-represented styles to gain a foothold in the marketplace and contribute to the diversity of Ireland’s musical landscape.

The mass media represent another central node in the Irish music industries. As mediators between artists and audiences, media broadcasters retain powerful gatekeeping roles that position them as the arbiters of taste. Shortly after the partition of the island of Ireland in 1921, the two countries on either side of the new border established state radio stations to curate and promote their own distinct national cultural heritage. Nevertheless, listeners could tune in to broadcasts on the other side to hear the latest popular hits if their own national broadcaster wasn’t playing them. Chapter Two uses The Fanning Sessions, perhaps the most respected popular music radio show in Irish broadcasting history, as an example to study the pivotal role of these media in the music industries. Drawing on interviews with host Dave Fanning and producer Ian Wilson, Helen Gubbins and Lonán Ó Briain illustrate how the show attempted to present an “all-Ireland” borderless representation of Irish popular music. An appearance on Fanning’s show was a career-defining moment for emerging artists. Beyond radio airplay time, featured musicians were offered extensive recording time in the high-spec studios of RTÉ, something that was otherwise beyond the financial means of young performers in the 1980s, which enabled them to produce demos and, in many cases, secure their first recording contracts.

One way that musicians wrestle control of their image from the recording and media industries is through the production of memoirs. These books enable artists to inscribe their own versions of history in which they can elaborate on a lyric, correct a misrepresentation, propagate a new myth or even add fuel to the fire of a public feud. Memoirs also offer an alternative income stream to established artists, quite often with greater royalty percentages attached and without the need for going through the efforts involved in a new composition or recording. Many of the leading Irish artists from the 1970s onwards have produced their own versions of these carefully crafted narratives. In Chapter Three, Laura Watson analyzes four memoirs by recording artists from Dublin: Bono (U2), Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), Bob Geldof (The Boomtown Rats), and Christy Dignam (Aslan). She argues that these famous figures, who first established themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, draw on Ireland’s storytelling traditions in the construction of their narratives. This creates a bridge between the nation’s musical and literary heritages for Irish readers, while the format and presentation of the memoirs appeal to readers abroad.

Upon noting the “gendered silence” in the male-dominated sphere of popular music memoirs, Watson uses an example of the absence of a memoir by one performing artist who has influenced popular culture and society in Ireland more so than most: Sinéad O’Connor (also known as Madga Davitt and Shuhada’ Sadaqat). Aileen Dillane takes a step towards addressing this imbalance in Chapter Four with a comprehensive study on O’Connor’s life experiences, religious faith, political interventions and feminist views. From the 1973 fight for the right to contraception to the 2018 abortion referendum, she has consistently used the stage afforded to her through her ability as a performer to deliver scathing critiques on faith, politics and feminism. Not one to shy away from controversy, she challenged the status quo by pushing back against the power of the Catholic Church in late-20th-century Ireland, aligned herself with Irish Republicanism by performing rebel songs and commemorating hunger striker Bobby Sands and appropriated Rastafarian and Black-Power symbolism to protest structural inequalities, institutionalized racism and child abuse. On a personal level, this noisy energy has exacted a painful toll; on a professional level, she has reshaped the boundaries of the industry and transformed the ways women are seen and heard in Irish society.

On her election in 1990, the Republic of Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson, pithily observed, “I was elected by the women of Ireland who, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system” (RTÉ News, 9 November 1990). The 1990s was a period of profound change in the Republic of Ireland. Since then the country has shifted from a socially conservative, religious state to a relatively liberal, progressive society. Throughout this transitional period, one group consistently using their music to promote activist causes is Zrazy, an electro-pop duo and one of the only prominent lesbian voices in Irish popular music over the past three decades. Ann-Marie Hanlon explains in Chapter Four how Zrazy’s lesbian-feminist consciousness has developed over time from their first album in 1992 to their latest release in 2016. She situates these recordings and performances in their social and political contexts to illustrate the ongoing struggle for recognition and respect for women’s music, queer culture and feminist voices in Irish society.

Few periods in Irish history have influenced popular culture as much as the Troubles in Northern Ireland (late1960s to 1998). In the midst of sectarian warfare, an unlikely punk subculture blossomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Chapter Five revisits this first wave of punk in Northern Ireland. Drawing on interviews with former punks and his analysis of songs from the era, Timothy A. Heron argues that this disruptive subculture inadvertently became a meeting point for youths to celebrate antisectarianism. Punk, after all, “tries to tear down the boxes thrown around the human condition” (Ensminger 2016, ix). For a brief period, this Northern Ireland punk scene created something that successive government bodies and religious organizations had failed to achieve: a liberal space for amicable cross-community engagement.

References

Ensminger, David A. 2016. The Politics of Punk: Protest and Revolt from the Streets. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Williamson, John, and Martin Cloonan. 2007. “Rethinking the Music Industry.” Popular Music 26 (2): 305–22.

1
A History of Irish Record Labels From the 1920s to 2019

Michael Mary Murphy

Rob Strachan and Marion Leonard have argued that Ireland’s music industry was undermined by “problems that have historically led to the global success of Irish artists being of principal benefit to companies based in other countries” (Strachan and Leonard 2004, 48). More recently, Gareth Murphy compared the Irish music industry with a “trading post that facilitates the outflow of raw materials to foreign factories and the import of products back in” (Murphy 2015). Naturally, for Ireland, there are negative economic consequences if the “raw materials” of the music industry, music, songs and intellectual property rights, are owned and exploited by overseas firms. This is particularly significant when, as the organization representing the multinational interests of recording music industries, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), reports, the global music market is currently growing after a decade of decline (IFPI 2017).

Ominously for a small country like Ireland, the IFPI had previously concluded that most European markets “show that investment in local repertoire is alive and well” (IFPI 2013). Indeed, in most European countries, local acts account for the majority of the best-selling albums. In 2013, local acts accounted for 85% of the 20 best-selling albums in France and 70% of the 10 best-selling albums in Germany. In dramatic contrast, in Ireland, according to the trade group Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) during the same period local acts accounted for a paltry 5% of the country’s 20 best-selling albums. In 2018, no Irish act managed to reach the number one position in the singles charts. However, Irish acts did manage to reach the number one position in the album charts. Both The Academic and Kodaline topped the chart, although only for a week each. For the remaining 50 weeks of 2018, Irish music listeners appeared to favour overseas acts.¹

The lack of local acts at the top of the local charts is particularly interesting given Ireland’s supposed advantages in the popular music field. The proximity to the British market, a mythologized inherent musicality, as well as speaking English, the dominant language of global pop, are clearly not enough to give Irish acts the ability to dominate the home popularity charts.

The IFPI argues that “record labels are the primary investors in music,” with allegedly US $4.5 billion annually spent in “discovering, nurturing and promoting” music acts (IFPI 2016). Despite this, the current configuration of the Irish music industry results in Irish acts being a small minority in their own domestic charts. At present the Irish music industry clearly doesn’t provide local acts with clear pathways to achieving the chart percentages enjoyed by local acts in territories like France and Germany. In fact, the Irish case illustrates how small countries may not be benefitting from what the industry organizations celebrate as “the increasingly global reach and mind-set of record companies [which] has brought about a major shift in the opportunities for artists from all over the world” (IFPI 2019). It would be helpful if the IFPI provided a breakdown by country of origin, showing how their stated figure of US $4.5 billion of artist development investment is actually spent.

It is within this framework that Ireland’s local record labels should be appraised. While local Irish labels are capable of both local and global success, they are not the dominant forces in the local industry. Clearly, they are minority players in the national charts. Also, in Ireland’s case, with the absence of investment by the major global firms, innovation comes from the sometimes surprising and often unpredictable local entrepreneurs. This chapter aims to document the previously under-researched activity of local Irish record labels by identifying some of the notable labels founded by Irish entrepreneurs.

Records and the Irish Overseas

From the earliest days of the recording industry in Ireland, when mass-produced records became widely available in the early...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Popular Music in Ireland: Mapping the Field
• Part 1: Music Industries and Historiographies
• Part 2: Roots and Routes
• Part 3: Scenes and Networks
• Coda
• Afterword
• A Selected Bibliography on Irish Popular Music
• Notes on Contributors
• Index